1984 review: George Orwell's dystopia comes to terrifying life on stage

There has never been a time, in the sixty-plus years that have passed since George Orwell's groundbreaking dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, that its concerns have felt anything less than vital. Relevance will never be a concern for any adaptation, but a year on from Edward Snowden's momentous NSA leak, with new revelations still coming daily, Orwell's vision of a world without privacy has never looked more prophetic.

Yet Headlong's innovative staging, which transfers to the West End's Playhouse Theatre following its critically acclaimed run at the Almeida, isn't content to coast on the evergreen thrills of its story. Taking as their jumping-off point the novel's little-read but telling appendix, co-writers and directors Duncan Macmillan and Robert Icke engage with the idea that while the year 1984 was in Orwell's future, it's now well in our past. If Winston Smith's story is a remnant of the past, rather than a vision of the future, what changes?

Regarded by many Orwell scholars as the story's true ending, the appendix is written from an unspecified point in the future, and hints that the totalitarian Party ultimately fell from power, rather than reigning victorious as the novel's final chapter implies. What led to their defeat wasn't a rebellion, but their own failure to replace the English language with the stripped-back Newspeak, which aimed to quell rebellion simply by making complex thoughts impossible to express. The intriguing idea behind all this is that the written word is resilient in a way that the human spirit isn't.

Thought criminal Winston Smith (Sam Crane) commits his first act of tangible treason when he writes in a journal, an act of expression punishable by death under The Party's regime. In Macmillan and Icke's production, the journal takes on even greater significance as a historical artefact, with his words being dissected by members of a book club somewhere in the near future. It's an initially jarring framing device that pays off spectacularly well in the third act.

An oppressive sense of dread pervades every stolen moment between Winston and fellow rebel Julia (Hanna Yannas) - in a surveillance era twist, the secret room in which they conduct their quiet, desperate and doomed love affair is screened to the audience via hidden camera. Their subsequent capture loses none of its power by being so clearly telegraphed, the moment itself a genuinely terrifying cacophony of lurid sound work and disorienting lighting.

Although the overlapping timelines only emphasise how essentially passive Winston is as a hero, Crane's raw, fragile performance gives him a compelling dimension, while Yannas is an effervescent force of nature as the defiant, straight-talking Julia.

Winston's job at the ironically named Ministry of Truth is to erase convicted criminals from existence after their execution, making them into an "unperson" by removing their name from records and news archives. In one of Macmillan and Icke's most ingenious moments, this process is made flesh and blood - we see the same conversation play out three times, and in the final iteration a character has simply vanished, with everything else remaining unchanged. He has become the equivalent of redacted text, the words surrounding him taking on fresh, sinister meaning.

Running at breathless pace without an interval, Headlong's 1984 is a production that grips you by the throat and doesn't let go for a single one of its hundred minutes - your nerves will be run ragged long before the viscerally disturbing climax in Room 101. It's chilling, innovative and visceral theatre.